June 2008

June 30, 2008

Today's Boston Globe features a front-page story on the end of the 20-year experiment with Boston University running the public schools in Chelsea. The university stepped in at a time when confidence in local government in Chelsea may have been at an all-time low. Indeed, the entire city went into state receivership soon after the BU takeover of the schools. The article credits the university for sticking with the project and bringing more than $27 million in added funding to the schools in the working-class community just north of Boston. Facilities have been upgraded and there are music and art classes and AP courses where before there had been none. But despite all the efforts, the city's schools remain mired near the bottom on indicators of student achievement. The district has the second-lowest graduation rate in the state, according to the story, and 58 percent of eighth-graders failed last year's MCAS math test.

The BU effort may have been admirable, but it's awfully hard to say it was successful. The story seems to underscore the need to dramatically remake schools serving poorer children, if they are to truly break free of the pattern of low achievement scores in low-income communities. It's an argument that is made in "Held back," the cover story of CommonWealth magazine's recent special issue on education.

Apologies to the late Pauline Kael for using a simplistic version of her "Nixon" quote today in my Boston Globe column. A reader has pointed me to her Wikipedia entry, which has her saying, in an interview after the 1972 election, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

That's less clueless than "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him," but it makes the point about geographic political polarization almost as well.

The city of Worcester, tired of waiting for the Legislature to do something about the home foreclosure crisis, is asking for permission to act on its own, reports Shaun Sutner of the Worcester Telegram. If a home-rule petition passes on Beacon Hill, the city would "halt sub-prime foreclosures for six months, protect tenants in foreclosed buildings and force judicial review of foreclosures."

The Dover Amendment, which exempts religious and educational institutions from local zoning laws in Massachusetts, has become a big issue in Framingham, according to Dan McDonald of the MetroWest Daily News:

During the debate, incumbent state Rep. Pam Richardson, D-Framingham, said a collegiate football stadium and a group home both fell under the Dover umbrella.

"It's so broad in language it almost creates a loophole in which agencies can use in order to bypass community input," said Richardson later that week.

One of her Democratic opponents in this year's state rep race, Town Meeting member Chris Walsh, called Dover "one of the vaguest laws imaginable."

Dover also got a bad rep in Weston when Regis College used the law to cover a 362-unit retirement village, as Ray Hainer reported in CommonWealth last year.

June 23, 2008

The Berkshire Eagle has a great profile of MassINC's executive vice president, John Schneider, a Pittsfield native (and current Lowell resident) who is one of the chief driving forces behind the Gateway Cities initiative.

I have a piece in today's Boston Globe on Barack Obama's apparent decision to focus on states where the Democrats made gains in 2004, rather than on the states that put Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992. Unfortunately, the Globe's online version does not include the map I mention; it's reproduced below, along with a bonus map.

June 20, 2008

The Eagle-Tribune's Edward Mason reports on the collapse of a program in Lawrence that would have purchased homes on the verge of foreclosure and then lease back them back to their original owners until they could buy them all over again (at a discount price). The problem for the nonprofit Lawrence CommunityWorks is that the many of the homes are falling apart:

Jessica Andors, the agency's deputy director, said the nonprofit organization determined the plan, aimed at slowing the city's foreclosure crisis, turned out to be too expensive...

Andors said the homes rescued by the agency would need extensive restoration. Homeowners at risk of foreclosure, Andors said, often are in such a tight financial squeeze that they also fail to keep up their homes, often putting off repairs so they can pay their mortgage and other bills.

Robert Preer reported on Lawrence CommunityWorks, and some of their more successful programs, in the Summer 2005 issue of CommmonWealth.

June 19, 2008

Matthew Ygelsias rightly gets annoyed by poll analysts who say a particular demographic group (almost always in the middle of a continuum) is "key" to an election. As he points out, a vote is worth the same whether it comes from a 20-year-old black guy or a 70-year-old white woman. And if any group is a "swing group," it's the one with the most undecided voters.